“Dance is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts..."

Some friends of ours have asked us, several years in a row now, to join them in watching their daughter dance at a local annual dance competition. North Carolina State University has hosted this event. She is just addicted to ballroom dancing, and does very well. We thoroughly enjoyed it, and I practiced sketching some of them from this event. It was great fun, because these folks really have such a love of dance, and it was mesmerizing to see them go from early in the day ‘til evening with hardly a break.
During one break, a little girl who was a spectator in the audience approached one of the young male dancers and asked him to teach her to dance, which he readily did. It was endearing to watch how sweet he was with her and how excited she was to learn.

They danced for the sheer joy of it and their passion just oozed…

“The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.” (-Mata Hari)

"We're fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance." (Japanese proverb)

I'm dancing today, because I finished my taxes.

It's always such an arduous task, and the prospect of it ranks right up there with getting a crown on a tooth or standing in line at the DMV. I was determined to end today with taxes "behind me."

This year, I'm dancing, too, because while I DO owe money, it's such a minuscule amount that I'm thrilled: I think it means that I actually calculated my withholding status so that it makes some kind of nutty sense.

And the Big Tax Rebate will be coming soon. I think along with dancing, we'll take a bit of that money and plant some beautiful knockout roses at the end of the yard. My sweet mother, at the end of her life, couldn't walk, so it was hard for her to get out and about. She loved to go shopping sometimes, just to get out of the house, and see people and things. She'd call me and say, "Do you think you and I could spend a day 'helping the economy?'"

Edwin Denby, the American poet and dance critic, said:
"There is a bit of insanity in dancing that does everybody a great deal of good."
So, yeah...I'm dancin'